There’s nothing subtle about purple. It leans longingly toward the garishness of pink but is restrained by the subsonic throb of black; it is demanding but not shrill. “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it,” Alice Walker wrote, and that may be true of purple wherever you find it, in a field or on a wave forecast.
The days of calling a phone number to find out surf conditions are of course long gone. Now it’s all clicks and swipes and digital maps, where ocean wave heights are color-coded, in ascending order, from blue to yellow, orange, red and, finally, purple, which commonly signifies seas of 25 feet or greater. Digitally rendered, the wavelets stirred by soothing trade winds register as wide bands of powder blue, and hurricanes have tiny dark hearts.
When conditions are just right, a chart will show a huge mass of mauve or lilac or
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